In 1968 I was in a private boys school on Manhattan Island. A day in the spring we had a guest speaker who was a well known writer and historian whose expertise was in the American Civil War. The Q and A section of the presentation got off track. I don’t remember exactly how but someone in the Senior class got a whiff of prejudice and started goading him. The writer made some lamentable comments, the two I remember specifically were; “What young people listen to today is not music.” This went over like a lead balloon but his next comment almost created a full fledged student revolt. “What you listen to is noise inspired by inferior Negro culture.” Holy Crap! The young, mostly white, liberal revolutionary guard went off: Booing, yelling, some walking out. I had a friend in my class who finally got a chance to speak asked our guest: “What do you think music is?” The speaker said something akin to: Music is an elevated expression of western culture.” Not helpful in getting the booing to stop. When the cat calls died down my pal said. “Sir, respectfully No. Music is the organization of sound, which has been done by people all over the world forever.” My friend went on to become an important A and R man and vice president of SONY music. But that day he was my hero. Later that night at home my dad balled me out for showing disrespect to the visitor. We didn’t know enough about western culture to dismiss its superiority out of hand. We should have sat and listened and then had a civilized debate among ourselves. This was the sixties and my father had a hard time with young people acting “smart assed” as he put it.
But today I was thinking back on my buddies definition: Music is the organisation of sound. I was sitting with my dog Dot by the river listening to the sound of water and the sounds of birds moving through: there was the chirping of sparrows and the chirring of thrush, the cawing of crows and the melodious singing of song birds. But underneath all the singing was the sound bed of the river, whose water was down a good deal from the flood stage: a gurgling and clunking over stones, a hissing as it turns around a gentle corner. For almost all my life I have found the sound of a river flowing to be some of the most beautiful, most calming sounds I have experienced, from the sound of the Hudson River passing under a wharf to the Pasayten River tumbling over sharp glacial stones to the Carmel River running slowly over rounded river rock. Its beautiful but is it music? Even my revolutionary friend described it as an organisation of sound “done by people.”
First, is it organized? Lets leave the birds out of this for the time being, because I don’t know enough about the birds to speak clearly. But just the sound bed of the river, its shaped by many factors, the amount of rain feeding into the river, the pressure created as the water is squeezed through the channel in the rocks and soil. A waterfall makes a much different kind of sound than a stream like the Carmel River right at my spot of the river which has reached the meandering stage where the water is more pushed along the bed than flowing down. Certainly the sound of wild water flowing is shaped by rainfall, elevation drop, and the geology of the bed. But again in any sense is it “organized?”
Here is a video of the Carmel River at near High Water.
Maybe we are off the edge of “What does it matter?” into the realm of semantics. But i don’t think so. Rivers are clearly are shaped, birds are shaped by a slow and gradual process which we might call evolutionary. In a real sense geology, climate, and gravity organize landscape. All of these elements together work to select certain features that we see before us. Geology selects riverbeds, Elevation change selects speed of flow. Gravity is the motivation towards change. This seems to me to be “organisation”.
What the river doesn’t have is a performative sense of purpose. The way that human music has. The river makes music, but it’s not making this music for me. In the north at break up the river cracks and clatters, in some places candle ice creates bell like tones. At Niagara Falls the elevation change creates a Mahler type thrum and roar. But at no time is there an indication that it does this to please us or express our conflicts and define our group lessons the way fiddle-tunes, Delta Blues and Symphonies do.
But I’m sticking to my new found belief that wild sounds are a type of music. Who organizes it? The earth organizes it. I only wished I had raised my hand and added that thought to the discussion back in 1968. I think our guest speaker’s and my father’s head would have exploded with the impudence of it,.
Here is recording of me reading “Ask Me” by William Stafford. Here Stafford imagines a frozen river and it reveals something another side of himself that his fan’s usually miss in his work. William Stafford, like John Haines had a great cold… almost an iciness coursing through his work.
Plum Blossoms
falling on the trail at sunset,
Why am I so sad?
